Final task video: "The Devil's Playground"

This is the video we created for our final task, appearing as uploaded to YouTube. We have collaborated well and managed to complete our video in good time. It took a long while to edit because we wanted the film to have good continuity, a consistent brightness, contrast and lighting. We wanted it to be sharp, and be as close to a professional mainstream film from the Big Six as possible. This meant including the use of sound effects and saturation distortion, as well as the inclusion of car stunts.

We described the film (particularly the opening scene we produced) like this in the YouTube description: "One year after her reckless friend Doug killed her while driving under the influence, Sarah returns to haunt him as he sets out to a booze-soaked party."

We hope you enjoy watching!

Reshoots!

Last week we went out filming our reshoots to accommodate our new plot. Here are some photographs displaying our shooting techniques.




Trying to minimise natural light using an umbrella technique

Shooting inside the car from the backseat during a stunt

New prop - Sasha the car!

For filming now, we have a new prop in the form of Paddy's car (nicknamed Sasha, courtesy of Paddy's oldest sister), as the new scenes we are shooting require some stunt driving to be done so the Doug character appears intoxicated at the wheel.

Location: Impossible II

To get these shots including the car, we wanted a quite enclosed area with trees and a good light balance. At first we had no idea where to shoot these so these are the places we went to check out:

We have been location scouting using Google Maps to find the perfect location for our flashbacks to happen. We're looking for a place with a lack of natural light, unfortunately this setting in the image is to open and prone to a lot of wind therefore filming here would reduce the sound quality as well as disrupting the actors, moreover it is a very public place and as our two actors are quite shy when in the company of strangers amongst the set. Also as we are going to be using beer bottles as props there may be some confusion with the public as both of our actors are under the age limit.
< This is Kings Drive on the left as you can see it would be the perfect place for a couple of friends to hang out as there is a picnic bench a place to park your car and a nice view, however it is to light for a horror story to take place in, it juxtaposes the whole theme of our film, despite its locality and surreality it will not work in our film.



We have finally come up with an answer... we are going to film in Royden Park, it has the same atmosphere and features as Ashton Park except it actually has a car park, moreover it isn't open and it is covered with trees therefore reducing the light exposure. Despite it being a public place we think this is the best option.

New story ideas

Paddy and I have been brainstorming this morning in our study period to find a solution to our storyline. Our aim was to add depth and character development to our project as we realised just a chase sequence was all physical without any psychology, and psychology is a big part of the best horror films, like The Shining, Rosemary's Baby and The Ring. Here's what we came up with:

Finished filming (or so we thought!)

Yesterday we finished all of the separate shots of Kirsty which we have been waiting to do for a number of weeks. I edited all the shots and merged them into the pre edited storyline and watched as our previous three months of work unravelled, as a two minute clip, on screen. On reflection we all agreed that there wasn't enough psychology there was too much physicality involved in our story line, therefore we now need to re-mould our storyline and create an actual plot via Lost-style flashbacks (instead of a continuous chase scene, which wouldn't be as interesting in terms of drama). We have a few ideas at the moment but hopefully once we sit down and brainstorm we should have a great story.

Fake Injuries and Specialised Wound Kit

We spent time before filming ensuring that we were equipped in the skill of make up, fortunately on of our group took really well to it; Luke, therefore he received the title of make up artist. Its a really tricky skill to create the correct gradient which matches with the skin and Luke did it really well taking into account that the tools we were using were very basic: Vaseline, Make-up Clay and fake blood (red food dye mixed with tomato ketchup).

Horror Genres & Sub-Genres

These are the various different genres and subgenres of horror which we considered in planning our final task. My favourites are the demonic possession films (The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, Jennifer's Body), psychological thrillers (Buried, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, The Shining), supernatural chillers (Carrie, Insidious, Poltergeist, Drag Me To Hell), zombie films (Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead, World War Z), slashers (Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw, Scream), and films that mix horror with sci-fi (Alien, The Thing, Scanners, Slither). We went with the demonic possession/supernatural aspect as it would give us the best opportunity to play around with different lighting and editing styles, as well as being able to be done on our miniscule budget.